Daniel Wappling

Daniel Wäppling is currently head of Product Architecture at ABB Robotics. This mechanical engineer has held a variety of positions from Global R&D Manager to Principal Scientist at ABB. Wäppling sits on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Autonomous Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, and is on the Board of Directors for European robotics non-profit ok.

Wäppling lives in Västerås, Sweden with his wife and two children.

Daniel says:

“The R&D investment in robotics technology is really increasing. It’s really driven by automotive industry, IT companies and public funding.

There is a trend around collaborative robots. You want robots working next to humans so you can benefit from the cognitive capabilities of humans combined with the robots doing the tasks, the heavy lifting, etc that you don’t want the humans to do. The dirty, dull and dangerous tasks.

IN ABB, we have remote service where 5000 of our robots are connected wirelessly to the cloud and we have a centre that analyses the data from these robots. By doing this you can decrease the unplanned stops of your production line of your robots by 50%. Just one example of using connectivity and data analytics to create value.

Productivity is everything for our customers. Reliability of the products has been going up quite dramatically. If you look at the same product over three generations, you can increase the mean time between failures by a factor of 10. In the end it just has to be robust and consistent.

My view is that there is no legal uncertainty. The machine can’t be accountable. Whoever designs or commissions or runs the machine is responsible for the machine. “